


Pearl

by TnT6713



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 15:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2736950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TnT6713/pseuds/TnT6713
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You cannot move, but you aren't sure you want to. There is no light anymore; you are the light."</p>
<p>The Horrorterrors make Rose their vessel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pearl

The light is weak, and that is okay. It peeks in through the slotted blinds, asking permission to enter; you reach to let it in, but your hand falls away, dissolving by your side. You pull your sweater more tightly around yourself, gaunt, hollow in the November air. Your eyelids are heavy. You keep them open. The radiator hisses to life in the corner of the room; perhaps in a few hours it will be warm enough inside your knit cocoon to lull you to sleep.

A low cello hums at the bottom of your mind, underscoring the full, inky depths of your vision. A single candle is lit; the yellow light gives you no warmth. A tentacle, grey and glistening, reaches out to you, but does not touch. Large, white eyes open before you. A gentle, booming voice, “Rose…” You breathe the word in, absorbing the creature’s faraway rumble with it. Round eyes blink into existence around you. The creature’s friends loom over you, watching: they inhale as though about to speak, but pause at the precipice. You open your mouth and white air blooms out before dissolving into the darkness. Then everything fades.

Sharp daylight wakes you, forceful in its bleakness, rays piercing the spaces between the blinds. Wind whistles into your room through the crack between the window and the sill; you burrow further into your nest of blankets, but the thin fabric offers you little comfort. As you brush your teeth, you find yourself humming low under your breath, a tune you don’t remember recognizing, too instinctual to place. The high, metallic twang of the toaster ruptures whatever muffled thoughts filled your head. You pull out the individual halves of your English muffin one at a time, and their heat warms your bony fingers. You hadn’t realized you’d forgotten to blink until now.

Work is slow. Rarely anyone comes to the bookstore anymore—especially at ten on a Tuesday morning—and when they do come in, they ask you for recommendations from the ornately-decorated box of teas on the counter, and they almost always decide to buy the Earl Grey, despite the fact that you’ve recommended the jasmine every time you’ve been asked since you started working here. The layer of dust coating the books is visibly thicker by the end of your shift than it was when you got here this morning.

As you wrap your scarf tight around your neck, preparing to venture out into the cold, your phone buzzes in your pocket. You pull it out and stare blankly as the wide, flat faces and open smiles of people you try to call your friends fill your screen. It disappears after a few seconds, and the gnawing exclusion in your stomach is grateful. The tense ache usually dissipates fairly quickly, but you take an Advil when you get home anyway.

The night passes without the intrigue of a dream, but that may be because you’re not sure you were ever actually sleeping.

You don’t remember much of the following day; you don’t remember much of the following two weeks. Most of it passes with the same disappointing blandness as its predecessors. You’re trying to stop expecting things from the universe.

A spotlight beams down on you, but you can’t see where it begins. You consider looking up to find it, but everything is black around you. The creature hums your name, in harmony with invisible cellos, “Rose…” His eyes, followed by forty others, peer down at you, marvelous and milky. A slick, silver tentacle extends itself towards you; on it rests a single shimmering pearl. You pluck it carefully from the creature’s grip. It rolls smoothly between your fingers.

“Thank you.”

Your voice is foreign in this dream, soft and low and altogether faraway. You would swear it were someone else’s if you didn’t feel it scratching in your throat. The process of speaking cuts you up inside.

The creature dissolves into the darkness, and soon everything follows. When you wake up, a pearl sits patiently on your windowsill. You don’t notice it.

Your friends laugh. The yellow glow of the room is comforting, even though it’s filled with people. Their chatter is light but dense; a friendly-looking girl hands you a drink, which you accept with a polite smile and sip as you sink further into the worn sofa. She tries to make small talk with you, but none of it registers. The sound hits your ears and evaporates into nothing. You tune her out intentionally, looking past the brim of your glass for the friends who invited you to this party in the first place, but they’re out of sight—probably ingesting some form of illicit substance in the bathroom, cooling their faces on the tiled floor, pink tongues lolling out of their mouths along with woozy giggles, finally looking like the children they are. Your friends are so young, and you feel so old.

People about whom you don’t care enough to recognize have pulled a bottle of tequila from somewhere you can’t see and the friendly-looking girl jumps up with a squeal to join them. You consider following her, but gravity is stronger on this sofa than it is on Earth, and the quicksand-colored cushions have claimed you as one of their own. The more you struggle, the more they consume you. Sharp, shrill laughter emanates from a burly, bearded man in a Decemberists tee-shirt. By the time you’ve finished your drink, you can’t tell which of the clothes on the floor contain people and which don’t.

Something unpleasant gurgles in your abdomen; behind the beginnings of a headache, you wonder if somebody spiked your cup. You trip over the shadowy remains of warm-blooded partygoers on your way to the bathroom (where you aren’t surprised to find two of your friends entangled, limbs like tentacles, asleep in the tub). You lean over the toilet, thankful for once that somebody has left the seat up, and empty yourself. It comes in thick, taxing spurts, as it always does, but it isn’t what you expect: black bile, wet and cloying, leaves your lips, splashing dark against the clean white porcelain. You heave for longer than you usually do, hunched over the toilet like some sort of feral animal; your spine aches when you return to standing. The half-empty bottle of mouthwash lives proud and blue on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. With minty alcohol burning your gums (but not having reached far enough back on your tongue to completely ameliorate the taste of ink) and visible bags under your eyes, you decide to take the subway home. You’re in no state to walk the twelve blocks to your apartment.

You awake feeling sicker than when you went to sleep. You can taste bile in the back of your throat, the remnants of a memory you can’t quite remember, residue from something you thought you had imagined the night before. Your phone catches your eye, tempting you to call in sick so you don’t have to go to work, so you can burrow once more in your den of thin blankets. But you take two Advil and chug a glass of orange juice after you brush your teeth, and the overwhelmingly awful taste effectively masks the one lingering from whatever it was that left your system last night.

The bookstore receives a new shipment of paperbacks. While you stock the shelves with Lovecraft and obscure Aboriginal mythology, someone you can’t see buys the jasmine tea. You have cold pizza for dinner, and sleep without incident.

A pearl on your windowsill catches your eye. You want to wonder when and how it got there, but you worry the answer is that there is no answer. The fact that it is perfectly spherical is almost as off-putting as the fact that it shimmers in the dimness of your bedroom as if reacting to sunlight, none of which filters through the tightly-drawn blinds. You roll it between your fingers. You replace it on the windowsill and try to forget.

Your paycheck arrives; you treat yourself to sushi and avoid anything with a tentacle or eyes.

Instead of a spotlight, this time, the white sky is vast above you. You tread in the middle of an inky ocean, opaque black and warm. The depths are tempting. You’re sure you could forget how to swim if you wanted to, if submerging yourself felt as much like going home as you imagine it might.

A ring of grey tentacles rises from the water around you. They dance, too far to touch, to a rhythm you can neither hear nor understand. A whisper, just barely above the cello hum of the waves, evaporates like steam into the air, “Rose…” The water rises to your chin, forcing your head back. As you look up, something falls, dark flakes like inverted snow, which your dreamself understands to be the dust of dried blood, despite a lack of evidence to convince the waking self you house under the waves.

You take a deep breath, trying to fit as much air into your lungs as they’ll hold, and let the water take you. Everything fades to black.

Daylight barges into your bedroom without permission, mowing through blinds you don’t remember having opened. The light is cold. The radiator hisses; all the energy it’s supposed to use to generate heat snakes into your ears, instead of being absorbed by your skin. You turn the shower on as hot as it will go, boiling yourself alive like some kind of mindless crustacean. Steam covers the glass: just one more wall between you and the world.

You hum a familiar yet unnamable tune, eyes closed as you rinse the shampoo from your hair (in your mind, the hum is supplemented by a hundred bellowing cellos). Something slimy and thick wraps around your ankle and pulls; you scream, eyes springing open, shampoo burning your retinas as a writhing tentacle, silver and glistening, recedes into the drain, seeping an inky black liquid onto the floor of the shower. A chill wracks your body; you sink to the floor, shivering, curling in on yourself, arms around your knees, freezing as the scalding water beats ceaselessly against your back, and you know that your tears weren’t caused by errant soap.

Your mother calls, which isn’t something she does often, but it almost always goes the same way. If you ever bothered to transcribe your conversations with her, you’re sure they’d all be more or less identical.

_Hi, Mom._ / _I’m fine, Mom._ / _Yes, Mom, I’m eating._ / _Well, it’s still early, but I had dinner last night._ / _How are the meetings?_ / _Are you still going?_ / _You have to, Mom._ / _Mom—_ / _Fine, I won’t nag you._ / _You’re welcome._ / _I don’t know._ / _Because I don’t want to._ / _Mom, you know why I’m not coming home._ / _I like it here._ / _No, the cat died._ / _The cactus died, too._ / _Mom—_ / _I take care of you, don’t I?_ / _Mom, I have to go._ / _No, I haven’t been having any weird dreams lately._ / _No, Mom, everything’s fine—_ / _I just have to go, Mom—_ / _Goodbye, mother._

It’s really a very well-written script. The conversations always leave you hoarse and aching, but today you feel fresh lacerations in your throat, a new, stinging pain: the speaking cuts you up inside.

You hang up and nearly crush the pearl in your palm, before retreating to the kitchen, where you gargle a glass of saltwater.

Infinite, miniscule eyes blink up at you from the inky abyss—they, fireflies, you, the fire. They paw at you, tiny tentacles twisting around your limbs like vines, ivy growing against the side of an empty building (but you are so full; your body expels white-vapor breath every time you open your mouth, just to make a little room). They call to you, their voices a symphony of a thousand straining cellos, “Rose…”

You cannot move, but you aren’t sure you want to. There is no light anymore; you are the light.

The pearl has a crack in its shimmering surface, too thin to be noticed just yet, but waiting patiently, a dormant fault line, for the earth to split. You leave work lightheaded and take an Advil as soon as you get home, but it isn’t long before the pill reappears in the toilet, accompanied by thick, black bile and a tarry, foul taste coating your tongue. Your hands shake, and you tell yourself it’s because you’re gripping the sides of the bowl just so tightly, but even inhaling hits you with a fresh wave of nausea, and you don’t understand what’s happening to your body, and you don’t even know how to begin figuring it out, and you don’t know how you’d ever explain it to your doctor, and maybe some god you so adamantly don’t believe in is punishing you for being rude to your mother, and _why won’t it stop already, Christ, next you’ll be vomiting up a lung_. Maybe if you close your eyes, the room will stop spinning. You close your eyes. It doesn’t.

You breathe as slowly as you can, attempting to calm your frantic pulse. Eventually, you’re able to rise unsteadily to your feet, the ill, dizzy feeling not quite gone yet, knees aching. You stumble into bed without even bothering to brush your teeth. You wrap your thin blankets around yourself and, shivering, cry yourself to sleep.

Your dreamself’s jaw opens wider than that of your waking self, as though attached by looser hinges. Your tilt your head back, creating one long channel from your intestines to your waiting mouth, open to the darkness above, a sacrifice. A thick tentacle slithers its way up your esophagus; you can feel the way it stretches open the most intimate parts of yourself, parts no one will ever see, your churning stomach, your sore throat. It writhes in the cold air for a moment before it disappears, leaving you to choke on the sudden hollowness.

Your friends complain that they never see you anymore. You don’t know how to explain that you are afraid to get out of bed. You call in sick to work, telling your boss you’ve got mono and will probably be out for the foreseeable future; she sends her condolences and a bag of jasmine tea. You aren’t even able to make yourself a cup. You huddle inside your thin cocoon, clutching the pearl, running your thumbs across the crack (which becomes more pronounced the longer you look at it) and trying not to wonder how it got there. How did you get here? How did any of this get here?

The constant and frustrating shifts between freezing and feverish leave you exhausted, but with little time to sleep. Before your consciousness truly leaves, infallibly, you must either throw your blankets off or desperately clutch them to your clammy skin, never quite comfortable.

You stay in bed as long as you can. Either you have grown weak, your body caving in on itself, organs angry and shrinking behind your ribs, eyes sinking further and further into your skull, or the wind blows stronger than it used to, able to tip your balance by just brushing past your sharp shoulders, raising goosebumps from the skin pulled taut across your bones. Your mind pulses with the vibrations of cello strings, and it doesn’t matter how many bottles of Advil you swallow, because they never stay down, always convulsing in your stomach before leaving your mouth with stringy black sinews, scraping up parts of yourself you didn’t know were expendable. You’re inside-out.

Tentacles emerge from the toilet, reaching for something, anything, to claim as their own, to take with them and caress with the gentle intent to kill, the kind of grip that just loves a little too hard. They don’t retreat into the current when you flush. The water leaves the showerhead and the faucet black and rancid. They’re bringing the sewer to you.

The darkness feels thinner tonight than it usually does. The cellos screech to a halt as the monolith before you, whose rumble has become familiar, even a comfort, closes its eyes and opens its massive jaw: for the first time, you see innumerable teeth, sharp and bright. You catch a glimpse of your reflection. You don’t look like yourself anymore. “Rose…” And then the darkness swallows your friend and you are alone, surrounded by a million closed eyes.

At noon, fueled by bleak sunlight, the earth shifts; the pearl splinters open and out hatches a single infant tentacle, searching blindly for something to strangle. You open your mouth to scream, but instead of sound, a tentacle comes out, replacing your tongue, cracking your jaw wider than it is meant to open. Tears prick your already-glassy eyes. You can’t breathe, but it doesn’t matter—the cavity of your chest opens, ribs parting like double doors; the limbs of a thousand white-eyed creatures leave your organs, probing their new environment, studying the stale air of the room.

Your blood flows backwards for a few extended moments, like rewinding an old tape, before seeping out through your pores. Someday, maybe, you will decompose.

**Author's Note:**

> So... this fic is super dark. And super weird.  
> Couple things:  
> -I don't refer to them as horrorterrors in the fic because I actually used this story for something else. It wasn't intended to be a fic but I changed direction after the first paragraph and it turned into this.  
> -There's no Sburb session, so they wouldn't have met, but the friends in the tub may or may not have been Jade and John.  
> -Also, they're in their 20s. This isn't happening to some 13-year-old.  
> -Rose's mom is in AA.  
> -I haven't read any of the updates since the gigapause. After a year, kind of stopped caring. Whoops.  
> -The 'dreamself' referred to in the fic is not the same dreamself who woke up on Derse in the Sburb universe.  
> -I wrote the majority of this fic while listening to Tough Love by Forth Wanderers. Check them out.


End file.
